Many activities in which people participate require the person to reserve the facility or equipment prior to the time for use by the person. The reason it is necessary to reserve the resource is because often more persons desire the resource than is available. Therefore, the manager of a resource establishes a schedule of use in which participants have slotted times or spaces for use the resource. Some activities that require reservations are travel, car rentals and hotel lodging and recreational activities such as playing golf. Reservations help resource owners manage the use of the resource in order to achieve maximum and efficient use of the resource and maximum profit for the owner.
When the owner has fully booked or reserved the resource, the owner has to then turn away persons desiring to use the resource. However, if one of the reservations gets cancelled, or the reserver fails to show up the resource would go unused at that time. In this particular situation, this non-use would cost the owner money. To address this possibility, some owners require the reserving parties to put down a deposit to insure that the reservation slot will generate revenue. This solution still does not promote maximum and efficient use of the resource.
One approach to employ in an attempt to achieve maximum and efficient use is to overbook the resource. In this method, the owner would make the resource available to more users than could actually use the resource at the particular time. This practice of overbooking is particularly common in the travel industry in general and the airline industry in particular. In travel, passengers typically purchase tickets in advance of travel, and are included in a database of a reservation system as having a reservation. On the date of travel, they must check in, or their seat will be given up to other passengers. Because statistics show that there will always be a number of passengers who will not show up on the designated date of travel, carriers typically “overbook” by selling a number of seats over the number of seats that are actually available, based on mathematical calculations. If the passenger does not check in, their seat may be used to accommodate overbooking, or may be given to standby passengers. Overbooking is done because, often, some of the passengers with reservations do not actually take the flight. Thus, without overbooking, the flight would depart at less than capacity.
By overbooking the flight, the carrier seeks to maximize its profits by using the total capacity of the vehicle. However, if the overbooking level is set too high, some of the passengers booked on the flight will be “bumped” from the flight, i.e. will not be seated because there are fewer “no shows” than passengers booked. This inconveniences passengers who may become dissatisfied with the carrier. Thus, while trying to maximize profits, most carriers try to minimize the number of “bumped” passengers. In addition, this practice of bumping passengers requires that the carrier compensate the passengers that do not have seats as a result of overselling the flight.
There have been other attempts to address the problem of maximizing resource usage through a reservation system. U.S. Pat. No. 5,978,463, to Jurkevics, et al. describes an automated reservation scheduling system for audio conferencing resources. The reservation scheduling system schedules conference calls in real-time in a way that optimally makes use of audio conferencing resources. As a result, a party scheduling an audio conference may receive a confirmation and a conferencing phone number on the same call that the parties use to initiate the scheduling of a conference. The automated reservation scheduling system reserves audio conferencing resources to ensure that a sufficient amount of resources are available for the scheduled time slot in which the audio conference is to take place. The resources are reserved based upon a determination of the resources that will be required to realize the audio conference requested by the requesting party.
In another approach, a method of reserving resources is practiced in a computer system. In accordance with this method, an automated scheduler is provided for scheduling reservations of for the resource. A request is received from a caller to schedule a resource, which could be a conference room. The automated scheduler is then used to identify selected resources that are available to the requester. The selected resources are then reserved for use for the user.
Another reservation method is practiced in a computer system such that a request to schedule a facility at a given date and time is received by the scheduler. The resources within the facility are examined to determine the availability of resources at the specified date and time. The available facility resources that fulfill the needs of the requester are identified as qualified facility resources. Some of the qualified facility resources are selected as the ones to be reserved for the requester.
In another example of the reservation of an audio conference facility, a request to schedule a first audio conference is received on a computer system. A phone number that participants in the first audio conference may call to participate is determined and reserved. Audio conferencing resources to be used for the first audio conference are determined and reserved independently of the determining of the phone number for the first audio conference. A second request to schedule a second audio conference is received. A phone number and audio conferencing resources to be used for the second audio conference are determined and reserved interdependently. The determining of the phone number determines the audio conferencing resources to be used for the second audio conference.
Although these reservation methods do address some of the concerns related to achieving maximum usage of a resource, there has not been any focus on achieving maximum usage through rescheduling resources after the initial party has cancelled the initial reservation. There is a need for a system that can increase resource usage through the re-reserving the cancelled slot to a second entity interested in the slot.